“Project targets

As usual – like previously for Orange, Peach, Apricot and Durian – the Blender Foundation’s interest is to organize projects that will help Blender further:

Stimulate development of advanced production-level features.

Validation of Blender by great artists

Use and improve an open source creation pipeline

Deliver good publicity and PR for Blender

Create useful presentation and educational material in Open Content

Last but not least, provide a fun and inspiring experience for the entire Blender community!

We do this by inviting the best of the talents from the Blender community to work in Amsterdam for half a year or more, in the studio of the Blender Institute. They get excellent working conditions, and full coverage for travel and housing, including a reasonable fee. All of tools we use here for the film are open source, and everything we create, including the final result, is being delivered as free and open content under Creative Commons Attribution.

Mango concept

Since we don’t have a traditional commercial production method, the team who will execute Mango will get a near unsurpassed freedom in creating it. Some aspects have been frozen though, partially because of the technical targets, partially just do something different than the previous projects.

Short vfx-based film with real actors, 3-5 minutes.

Theme: Sci-fi in Amsterdam

Technical targets

Camera and motion tracking

Photo-realistic rendering

Improved color pipeline

Improve compositing, (video/vfx) editing, masking and grading

Fire/smoke/volumetrics & explosions

Fix the Blender deps-graph!

Free/Open Source software

For the entire creation pipeline in the studio, we will only use free/open source software. For 3D graphics, compositing and video editing we’ll obviously use Blender. The new ‘Cycles’ render engine will be used, which includes open source projects like OpenShading, OpenColor and OpenImage. For camera and motion tracking Blender uses Libmv. For imaging and drawing we expect to use GIMP, MyPaint, Krita and Inkscape a lot. Render output and footage will be using the OpenEXR format. Scripting will be done in Python. Studio database storage will most likely be in SVN. The workstations in the studio will be equipped with 64 bits Ubuntu Linux. We have our own render farm this time, running on Debian and Ubuntu.

Since we’ll work with external providers for music, sfx and mix, we can only recommend them to include free software in their pipeline, but won’t put stringent demands here.

Obviously we’re very interested to be in contact with free/open source projects of any kind, to check on what we can do together.“

This is all the information, I could found on Blender webpage but near the future I will add some preview screenshots.